[Excerpt] - Michael Lewis Chapter on Morey/Rockets

Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, has written a new book: 'The Undoing Project'

He looks into why people feel the need for analytics, and why it permeated into all industries: basketball, book publishing, golf, farming, medicare and more.

The first chapter is filled with discussion and quotes from Daryl Morey & Les Alexander, giving insights into things pertaining to the Rockets that we've discussed here on CF. Below are a few quotes/anecdotes I found interesting.

About GM-ing with the Rockets

1) At the start of his tenure, many of the stats that they use now just did not exist. The NBA organization didn't have them, no other team had them. It was down to Morey specifically hiring people to watch games and take a tally of events occurring on the court. To me that's impressive! Generating your own dataset to analyze is such a hard thing to do and implement. Lucky for us and him, Les Alexander was the Rockets owner.

2) Les Alexander

I really like the mindset of Alexander that's portrayed here - not caring what other people think, is a positive result of the Rejection Therapy that our own @DeAleck is promoting. The first italics quote is even better in that we see the precursor to our switch in playing style starting in 2009, and culminating in D'Antoni's hiring this year.

3) Developing the mind & the model.
Daryl's philosophy is that everything we do is to try and make a better prediction about the world around us. That's why he studed what he did and was driven to develop models. He wasn't going to make a model to predict his school grades, but he did use those skills for sports from a young age. At 16 years old he picked up a book called The bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Bill James was popularizing an approach rooted in statistical reasoning to think about baseball. That combined with the sport at the time gave him the first thought that maybe the experts of the sports didn't know as much as everyone thought they did.

Some of the questions that led him in developing the models:
- "Obviously [the players'] performance statistics told you something about [their future performance]. But which ones?
- "Did an ability to score points in collge predict NBA success?"

4) Drafting Aaron Brooks & Carl Landry: The percentage of getting a good NBA player at picks 26 and 31 were 8% and 5% respectively. The chance of getting a starter was one in a hundred. Despite this rich haul, Morey and the Rockets knew that they suffered from a dearth of data from the college game to translate to NBA stats.

He knew all this and yet he though maybe they had figured something out. Then came 2008.

5) On drafting Joey Dorsey: Morey's model

Where did it go wrong? His age - Turns out Dorsey was beating up on younger competition until the NBA and thus had excelling stats. I suspect we saw this also in Dorsey's return from the Greek League in 2014 - Dorsey seems like the tweener to dominate Greek team defense, but not have enough physical tools to do well in the NBA.

About other NBA players and drafting

1) About Sean Williams (07 draftee):
His agent arranged for a mock interview with the Houston Rockets in exchange for information on how to improve his clients interview performance. One exchange went as follows:

LOL! - I found it interesting that the Rockets got an exclusive interview on the promise of improving Williams' job chances.

2) Marc Gasol as a potential draftee in 2007: Morey's first year with the Rockets, he has the freedom to draft according to the model he had created by that point, but is not totally brave at his new job. The reason why Marc Gasol wasn't drafted? Rockets staff/scouts had seen a picture of Gasol shirtless, and he was pudgy, baby-faced & had jiggly pecs. One of the scouts started calling him "Man Boobs", and soon the rest did too with ManBoobs this and ManBoobs that, despite Daryl liking him based on his model. Marc Gasol turned out great, and a new rule was instituted at the Rockets: No more nicknames!

3) Missing on DeAndre Jordan, and picking Dorsey instead:


4)



Do try to read the chapter if you get a chance



I'll keep editing with a few more quotes/anecdotes posted

 

I enjoyed your post, thanks for the write-up. Enjoyed the part on Les Alexander, although I can see myself having a range of reactions if I were asked a question like "tell me you don't believe that ****" by a potential employer.

I wanted to let you know that there was another thread covering parts of this recently:
http://bbs.clutchfans.net/index.php?threads/excerpt-michael-lewis-chapter-on-morey-rockets.278998/

 

Haha yup!

And thanks for pointing out the other thread. Dangit, most of what I posted is already in there. Anyway that's just from the first half of the first chapter. There's more and I'll post if it's particularly good.

 

In the first thread, I warned @SamFisher that there would be many threads of this book. I think we will see new threads for years ... actually.

What's the Over / Under of how many threads this book will have in the GARM, when it's all said and done?

I think we are at 4 already.

I'm placing Over/Under at 11

 

but does the book talk about DMo?

 

Looking forward to hearing other highlights you want to pass along.

Plenty, if we give the DMo name to Daryl Morey now. *rimshot*

This could actually shed some light on why Daryl backed out of the contract in the end; he was sick of sharing his nickname.

 

There is an obvious reason why Morey is a much better trader than drafter. When he trades, he uses NBA data. When he drafts, he has to use college (very limited) or Euroleague data. Huge difference.

 

I've been choosing stars in the draft for years based on one thing. Last name. No joke. I noticed a trend about 15 years ago and it was players who have a typical first name as their last name turn out to be stars and I picked Leonard for just that reason and was pissed when Morey passed him up. Here are some obvious ones and mind you, a first name as a last name is pretty uncommon in the draft. I have found the odds to be excellent when using that strategy.

Tim DUNCAN
Ray ALLEN
Kobe BRYANT
Steve NASH
LeBron JAMES
Dwayne WADE
Carmelo ANTHONY
Chris PAUL
Dwight HOWARD
Kevin MARTIN
Paul GEORGE
Kawhi LEONARD
Anthony DAVIS

Can't think of any others right now and obviously you don't pick players who only have that kind of last name or you'll miss Durant, Westbrook, Curry, Harden, etc as well as a ton of solid role players but it's still a good indicator for me in terms of star status. I picked every player on the list above after LeBron James.

 

"I like it." - Clyde

 

What??????? Morris got us the Sisco Garcia. lool

 

to think someone got paid to edit this.

"That year the Rockets had the 25th pick in the draft and used it to pick a big guy from the University of Memphis named Joey Dorsey."

we picked batum with the 25th pick. dorsey was a 2nd rounder, 33rd pick.

"he watched the Memphis Grizzlies take Gasol with the 48th pick of the draft"

marc gasol was selected by the lakers and his rights were traded to the grizzlies in the trade for his big brother the next year.

 

True regarding also why his draft data put him in the category of drafters who like 4 yr players in college. btw: Patrick Patterson is doing fabulously on a "contender" for the Finals.

But I'd say he's noted for being good at trades as much for remaining flexible with assets as anything else, and his great negotiating prowess. He puts himself in a position of never being strapped with contracts unable to move when a trade presents itself.

 

Ming is also a typical first name as a last name, amirite?

 

This feels like plain old financial investing. A lot of mumbo jumbo about models and probabilities, to disguise the general unpredictability of the enterprise. What you'd really want to know is what the teams that made the right picks were thinking. I bet it's "Never in a million years did we think DeAndre would turn out to be this good. But, hey, we'll take it!"

 

Was it:

"We have found outliers such as DeAndre, Kawhi and Draymond Green score super high on our psychological tests measuring focus, drive and work-ethic...a measurement which we named after Hakeem Olajuwon -- "Fockass-ability". We got our methods from the MIT Psychology and Human Resources Analytics Lab, which is ironically next door to the lab Morey studied in -- which we call The Kingdom of Nerds."​

 

To be fair Morey drafted Dorsey with the expectation he would be the new age center, similar to what Draymond Green and to a lesser extent Harrell is doing now. I guess Dorsey was just someone bullying kids younger than he was and that was what broke the model, but if you look at it in a sense the prediction was right in that undersized hustle guys would become viable centers in the NBA.

 

This is kind of interesting, though I'm not sure Nash or Davis qualify as first names.

name

 

This makes me feel much better about my Joey Dorsey jokes here in Clutchfans...easily beats making fun of Terrence Williams. Btw where is TWill now?

 

They are probably less common first names but I've known two guys with the first name Davis and one guy named Nash. And then there's that old Don Johnson show Nash Bridges.

 

Ok, Les does not like to go by Gut feeling, he needs analytics. Extending McHale's contract - did that come from analytics or gut? Anybody ? Daryl ?